Antibiotic crisis needs united global response, say UK experts

Growing resistance to antibiotics and other drugs demands a coordinated global response on the same scale as efforts to address climate change, experts say. Without an international commitment to tackle the issue, the world faces a future in which simple infections that have been treatable for decades become deadly diseases, they warn.

Resistance to antibiotics to tackle bacterial infections and antimicrobial drugs used to treat parasites, viruses and fungi is spreading at an alarming rate. Treatment for many infectious diseases is now reliant on just one or two drugs.

Mark Woolhouse, of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, Centre for Immunity, Infection and Evolution, and Jeremy Farrar, director of the UK-based Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation spending £750 million ($1.26 billion) annually on biomedical research, outlined their concerns at an event hosted by the Royal Society in London and in a Comment piece published on-line in the journal Nature on Thursday (May 22).